Embodying Work-Life Balance as a Community Professional and Manager

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[00:00:04] Announcer: You’re listening to Community Signal, the podcast for online community professionals. Sponsored by Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community. Tweet with @communitysignal as you listen. Here’s your host, Patrick O’Keefe.

[00:00:25] Patrick O’Keefe: Hello. Thank you for hitting play on this episode of Community Signal and happy holidays. I hope that you are rounding out the year in a positive way.

Our guest is Allison Able, senior manager, community at Sisense, and we’re discussing why her first community team hire will be a community content manager, being a workaholic and setting the right examples for your team, and what the right order of community programs will be for Sisense.

This episode marks the sixth anniversary of the launch of Community Signal. I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who regularly listens to our show, has spread the word about it, or taken time out to share with me how Community Signal has impacted them. I really appreciate it.

Thank you to Carol Benovic-Bradley, the show’s editorial lead, and Karn Broad, our producer, for all of the work that they put into the show to make it the best it can be.

Thank you to our Patreon supporters, including Maggie McGary, Paul Bradley, Jules Standen, Serena Snoad, Aaron H., Rachel Medanic, Carol Benovic-Bradley, Marjorie Anderson, and Jenny Weigle. I never feel like I do enough for this group and we’re grateful for their kindness and support. If you’d like to join them, please visit communitysignal.com/innercircle.

Thank you to all of the guests who appeared on our show for the past year, and thank you to our current sponsor, Vanilla, for their support of independent community resources like this one.

And, of course, thank you for listening as well.

A former teacher turned community manager, Allison Able can trace her community-building ways back to high school, where she was the leader of multiple clubs. When she moved into education, it was shocking to her that teachers did not network. In response, Allison recruited a committee of teachers and developed a partnership with a local teaching college to launch the Teacher Leadership Network. TLN is still in existence today and has gathered thousands of local educators at all levels for networking events, webinars, conferences, and more.

When it came time to start a new career chapter, by a stroke of luck, she came across a job posting for a community manager role at Higher Logic, where she successfully built and launched over 25 communities for a variety of association and corporate customers, developed full-scale engagement programs and successfully revitalized several dormant communities. Additionally, she led a team of community managers to scale and grow one of the largest global enterprise communities. Today, she is the senior manager of community at Sisense, where she recently launched Sisense community beta.

Allison, welcome to the show.

[00:02:34] Allison Able: Hi, it’s so great to meet you. I’m super excited to be here today.

[00:02:38] Patrick O’Keefe: It’s so good to have you. This wasn’t planned, but a couple of episodes ago, Alex Witkowski was our guest and he transitioned into community work after being an English and creative writing teacher. You were previously a social studies and science teacher and a technology instructor before moving into more corporate environments. When I talked to Alex, he said that he “felt a very real condescension in those conversations.” He felt people didn’t respect him and his skills that he brought to the table when he was talking to potential employees about community roles. Was that something that you experienced as well?

[00:03:12] Allison Able: I did. One of the hardest transitions I made career-wise was moving from education into a corporate space, despite actually having a background in business. I was an entrepreneurial minor, did business competitions, had some business experience prior to going into teaching. When I had some initial interviews, when I decided to leave the education field, the common approach that I was given was, “You don’t have the right skills, you don’t bring much to the table. That’s great that you worked with kids, but can you work with adults?” All those different types of negative feedback.

What was actually interesting is when I went to apply for my first community position, I was really fortunate actually to have teaching be viewed as an asset. Heather McNair from Higher Logic at the time was really open and interested to what I could bring to the table, especially because they were interested in engaging more educational institutions too. I did have that opportunity presented to me, but also she could see that there were some translatable skills in organizing a classroom, bringing kids together, creating a content plan to keep people engaged and learning. I was fortunate for my first community position to have that door open, but prior to that, I definitely faced the same adversity.

[00:04:28] Patrick O’Keefe: I don’t want to say that it’s a bad thing to go from teaching to working in community in education sense because that was Alex’s path too. Course communities, and he’s a community lead at Section4, which is a course provider, but also, it’s like you had to go to the education space to see the value of your experience first. I’m at CNN now, and it’s funny to me because there are a few news industry-related jobs that I’ve applied for over the years.

It wasn’t journalism- or journalism in a sense, but these weren’t journalism jobs in the sense of covering stories and doing reporting. These were audience engagement community sort of roles. Something I heard more than once was that I wasn’t a good fit because I didn’t have a journalism degree. It’s not the same, but it’s similar in a way is that I’ve built community in so many places and for so many different people. Yet, it wasn’t enough for this specialized thing. Of course, that’s changed. I’m at CNN now. I laugh at that sort of thing because the world changes slowly over time or pretty quick in some cases. This case, that’s pretty quick I would say, 5 to 10 years, but still, yes, you had to go through that vector to be seen as having the skills necessary for what I presume was an entry-level community job that you were then transitioning into.

[00:05:42] Allison Able: Correct. It was an entry-level position, and I will say it’s definitely changed. One of the biggest things I’ve done as a former teacher is be an advocate for teachers that are interested in making a transition from education into any career field. Because I feel like one of the things that lacked- at least when I was going through college and growing up was I wasn’t prepared per se for career transition or how to position myself, and I learned through a lot of failures. I like to pass on those lessons learned, so people don’t necessarily have to repeat them, but also encourage people to take that journey and to find the fit that is meant for them.

I would never ever in a million years replace my teaching experience. It is some of the best experience I’ve gotten in life in multiple ways. I loved my teaching experience, but I wanted to expand my career and try other things. It was really hard to make that jump, but I’m so glad I did, and would encourage any teacher that’s out there to consider any role out there, but especially community because I do feel there are so many great natural fits for it.

[00:06:43] Patrick O’Keefe: Let’s pause here to talk about our generous sponsor, Vanilla.

Vanilla provides a one-stop-shop solution that gives community leaders all the tools they need to create a thriving community. Engagement tools like ideation and gamification promote vibrant discussion and powerful moderation tools allow admins to stay on top of conversations and keep things on track. All of these features are available out of the box, and come with best-in-class technical and community support from Vanilla’s Success Team. Vanilla is trusted by King, Acer, Qualtrics, and many more leading brands. Visit vanillaforums.com.

In the bio that you shared with me, you said that you’ve revitalized several dormant communities. Let’s talk about that. When you step into a dormant community, where do you start?

[00:07:23] Allison Able: It’s really funny because those are some of my favorite projects. I like to call it – you get to be a little bit of a Sherlock Holmes. You have to put your investigator glasses on and really dive in to figure out why is this community not working because oftentimes you’ll walk in and you’ll take a peek at the site. You’re like, “The site’s beautiful. There’s great navigation. There’s great calls to action. Why is this not thriving?”

Typically, what I do, and this may sound very basic, but I like to just do a complete site audit from top to bottom. Not only looking at the appearance, the technical infrastructure in the backend, and then also the operational piece of it too, what’s happening outside of the community, and then, of course, the content and engagement programs, et cetera. I go from top to bottom. I’m a huge believer in documentation. I probably over-documents things. I have this big spreadsheet that I build out. I’m tracking these things. I’m having conversations, organization-wide, everybody has access to this thing, and we’re collecting all this feedback. Then I take a good look and really start to hone in on a few key things that we may be able to adjust and change short-term, long-term to move that needle and start to revitalize the liveliness of that community space.

[00:08:42] Patrick O’Keefe: Let’s hear a few things that have worked in some cases that you’ve done for different types of communities.

[00:08:47] Allison Able: One thing that was really interesting that popped up recently in a conversation: direct invite, direct email. Email seems to be such a negative word these days. It’s been that way I feel like for a while. “Oh, don’t send an email. It’s just going to get lost. Nobody’s ever going to pay attention to it.” The only way we’re going to be able to engage anybody is if we don’t email them.

In my experience, I’ve actually found that not necessarily to be true. I found a lot of success with creating more of that personalized outreach, that of course is scalable. I’m not individually emailing 10,000 members, but I’m making it appear that I am. I am individually reaching out and checking in and seeing how I can provide assistance in their community journey or what they may feel may be missing. Another tactic I’ve taken is, “What’s a question that you currently have? I’d just love to learn more about what your current pain points are.” Through that, you start to develop a relation and an interaction that can actually be fed into the community too.

[00:09:49] Patrick O’Keefe: Even if you were writing an email individually, right?

[00:09:52] Allison Able: Yes.

[00:09:53] Patrick O’Keefe: What do you have to lose? You have an inactive community. Sometimes you put the cart before the horse where people think about or worry about scale, which is a vague word that means a lot of things, but you worry about scale. There’s no scale there. Maybe one day you’ll have to worry about scale, but right now you don’t have this community that you want it to be already. What’s the harm?

[00:10:13] Allison Able: Also, one thing that I think I love about the dormant communities, revitalizing them is it is a giant experiment. You have the ability to experiment, and by chance, you already have an audience that’s there, too. You may want to get more people in through the door, but you also have the people in the door and you can utilize that to your advantage too to reengage them into the process and into the community experience which is an asset because sometimes half the battle’s getting people to walk through the door order and create an account too.

[00:10:43] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. Email’s only bad if you send bad emails. Notifications are only bad if you send bad notifications. I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my current – in my opinion, terrible notification scheme. They have the opportunity for some of the really great high-value notifications, the things that they enable, the things that they create on LinkedIn. There are so many wonderful little moments, and yet, they’re telling me that my post with four likes is getting noticed.

I don’t understand this really cheap strategy they’ve laid out on what is the dominant professional social network of this time and has been for years now. They’re in such a strong market position and they’re hacking together these cheap notifications that mean nothing. The notifications have gotten more bad and have gotten worse. I don’t know how they got to that point because they had these notifications first that were like, “Your friend said this thing, go say something over there.” [chuckles] This is terrible. It’s just terrible. They’ve got ones that are like, “Your post is getting attention. You should tag a bunch of people,” which tagging- some people like it, some people don’t.

[00:11:42] Allison Able: Yes.

[00:11:43] Patrick O’Keefe: Indiscriminately tagging people in public, I don’t always love that, but I think that’s a very specific use case. Now they’ve changed. You have six reactions to- “Your post is getting noticed.” If every post is getting noticed, then really what posts are actually getting noticed? Because four likes, I appreciate all those likes, I appreciate everyone who reads anything that I write, but is your point to say that this post has traction right now? It’s so terrible. When things are bad, you send bad emails, you get bad results.

[00:12:10] Allison Able: I completely agree. It’s really funny you mention the LinkedIn notification thing too because I’ve stopped looking at notifications unless I have the number four or five on there. What I found is when it was one, it’d be like, “You had two people look at your profile,” and I’m like, “Great. I’m glad somebody looked at my profile, but I’m not really interested in that.”

[00:12:29] Patrick O’Keefe: Don’t you know you’re supposed to follow them up with the DM to sell them Sisense? That’s obviously what you’re supposed to do. Do you have a copy-pasted template? Because that’s what it seems like people do with that.

[00:12:37] Allison Able: Yes. Well, the funny thing is, my personal profile is anonymous anyways. I can’t even see who necessarily-

[00:12:43] Patrick O’Keefe: Oh, okay.

[00:12:44] Allison Able: -viewed my profile.

[00:12:45] Patrick O’Keefe: Got you.

[00:12:45] Allison Able: I’m that person that locks everything down, whether it’s actually locked down or not, we don’t know, but we’ll see if it affect our– I laugh because I’m like, “There’s nothing I’m going to do with this and I don’t find it valuable.” Like you said, it’d be great if they were able to serve up like, “Hey, we’ve noticed you took time to read some of these things. Here are some things we’d recommend you read that are similar,” or, “Here are some people we recommend you follow,” because even the people they recommend you follow aren’t always closely aligned either.

To the point about email too, one thing I’ll add, creating content that is also somewhat personalized, while I say you can send an email to 10,000 people, one thing that I really neglected to say in that, that I’ve been really intentional about is actually being more aware of my segments and how I can best serve my segments too. I do break down that communication so that it is somewhat applicable and somewhat not just a germane, “Welcome to the community. Join now.” I want to offer something in my outreach as well.

[00:13:42] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. When we got married earlier this year and I know you recently got married as well, congratulations again.

[00:13:47] Allison Able: Thank you. [chuckles]

[00:13:48] Patrick O’Keefe: I had an email list. Part of the RSVP was, we streamed it, it was just us two, I had an RSVP list and the RSVP list was just name and email address. That went in a list that will only be used twice. The one time it used was the morning of the wedding to include updates on what was happening that day and links to watch the stream, et cetera. We actually had some roadblocks. I won’t get into that right now, but we solved them all and sent an email out. I had a hundred recipients. I had a hundred successful deliveries. I had a 94% open rate, 575 opens, and 84% unique click rate on that email. Those are metrics that any email marketer would trip over themselves to have.

I know, I’m not saying those are something you should aspire to, but I wrote one good email. I had people in- they wanted to see that email. They wanted to open that email. They wanted to know what’s happening and that’s where you should try to get to. You want to get to a place where people want the email and want to open it, not that it’s just one more Black Friday sales notification.

I’ve had to check the calendar a few times. I’m not even kidding. Maybe it’s getting older. I get an email saying, “Black Friday sales are now,” and I’m like, “Wait a minute. Did I order things for Thanksgiving?” It’s like, “Wait a minute, I don’t want those emails right now.” Again, rambling, but to the point, you want to write emails that people actually want to have it opened, which seems obvious, but most emails that I get don’t really fit into that category.

[00:15:07] Allison Able: I agree, and like I mentioned, I think community is a give-and-take relationship in a lot of ways. If I am going to reach out to you, I do want to give you something that is going to benefit not only your experience, but in a lot of the customer communities I work in, provide an asset to you as well that’s going to enhance your professional life too and make your job easier, or your product experience easier, whatever is the applicable use case at that time, too.

Another thing I’ll mention with that and something that I’ve also been intentional about and had to learn through my community experience with email is making sure that I’m also connecting with those that are also sending emails outside of the community environments like your general marketing team, your product team, and making sure that I’m infused in those workflows as well so that I’m not being part of the email problem that often happens, where, “Why am I getting three emails from the same organization about three different things?” That’s also been a helpful tactic I’ve leveraged in that approach as well.

[00:16:05] Patrick O’Keefe: It’s a great point. Part of your mandate at Sisense is to build out a community team and your first hire is going to be a community content manager. Why?

[00:16:16] Allison Able: Great question. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to build a community team. I’m very excited to be at an organization that places such a value in community and high investment in it as well. Content was selected – It’s a really interesting thing. I’ve been doing a lot of research around building community teams. I’m a researcher by nature. It’s always interesting to me to see the directions that people have chosen and what they recommend as the first hire.

In this particular case, what I ended up leaning into was, I did a self-evaluation of what I bring to the table and what my strengths are, and what my potential weaknesses or areas of improvement are as well. I love content, but I will be completely honest. I tend to lean towards the operational side of community currently, so that was one area that I quickly identified, that could be a huge asset in the work that I’m doing. I really view a community team as a partnership, so I wanted to be able to bring somebody in with some more content experience that could create more of that holistic picture and be involved in that strategic evolution, too.

[00:17:24] Patrick O’Keefe: You are content with bringing someone in for content you could say. [chuckles] What is that going to mean? Community content manager, what are the core responsibilities for that person when they step in?

[00:17:35] Allison Able: Thanks for helping me promote this too. [chuckles] What I’m envisioning this role to be, and it will be an evolutionary role too, especially as we continue to grow out the community team and what that infrastructure looks like over time, what I see this position really doing is developing what our content strategy is going to be for community based upon our holistic community strategy too.

I’ve set the foundation for that, but I’m very excited to invite a partner in, to not only challenge and evolve that, but add an additional element to it. They’ll be in charge of the strategic direction, and they’ll be in charge of the execution of that strategy too, so ensuring that our content calendar’s created, developed, nurtured, executed on, bringing in new content authors, both internally and externally.

Eventually, also, we’re very interested in developing some customer content programs, so I envision that role really overseeing some of those efforts as well. Of course, they will evolve over time, and hopefully, they will be able to grow into a leadership position and have some people working under them too.

[00:18:41] Patrick O’Keefe: Is content in this usage – the content that’s posted in the community, is it helping members to ask questions right away and post their own content in the community? Is it creating content around contributions from the community like, “Here is a spotlight of the community’s contributions this month,” or something along those lines, or is it all the above?

[00:18:57] Allison Able: As you’re aware, content can mean a lot of different things, and I’m not defining it well. For this particular instance, the primary focus right now is going to be on our community blogs. We have two community blogs. We’ve chosen to take that direction; a general community blog, and then a product release focused blog. They’ll be in charge of ensuring that those areas are nurtured and built out and there’s a constant stream of information being shared there from both the customer and internal perspective.

Then the other piece that we’re really excited about is our knowledge base piece so being able to build out a knowledge base that our customers can access to and that knowledge base will again be fed internally through our internal experts, and then we’re very excited to turn a lot of our discussions into knowledge base articles as well, a commitment or goal that I’ve made, and it will take some time to get there, I am realistic, my hope is that over 90% of all of our threads have an accepted solution marked, and we’re able to take those and build out our knowledge base, and a partnership with our customers and only highlight their expertise but also get additional solutions in the community for our customers to find.

[00:20:07] Patrick O’Keefe: You got time to get that down, let’s say, before Christmas. [chuckles]

[00:20:12] Allison Able: Yes. [chuckles]

[00:20:12] Patrick O’Keefe: You mentioned a moment ago how the role might expand and you told me before this show that one of the challenges you’re thinking about is, “How do I create the right path to team growth, where we are able to accomplish our goals but also balance out role and responsibility to prevent burnout?” Have you had that happen in your own career where those things didn’t match up at one point?

[00:20:32] Allison Able: I’m the worst person to talk to about burnout because I’m a natural workaholic. I admit that. When I’m burning out, it’s probably beyond the typical person. That’s why I think I’ve been trying to be really intentionally reflective as I head into another management role to make sure that I keep that in mind because not everybody operates the same way that I operate or find joy in the same things that I find joy in work-wise.

That’s been one of the big pieces of the puzzle that’s been top of mind for me is with this scale is making sure that I’m putting the right role and responsibilities in place that I’m not overwhelming that individual so that they can thrive and grow and we can grow as a team too because my team can’t grow unless we are successful in multiple ways. A big part of that and some things Sisense values and I appreciate is employee health; both mentally and physically. I definitely want to keep that top of mind as I develop these positions.

[00:21:28] Patrick O’Keefe: Thinking about this as a workaholic, and myself, I don’t know if I consider myself a workaholic these days, I work hard and I try to balance out my life. I feel like as I get older, I tend to group things into a few different buckets and I try to make sure that all those buckets are getting hopefully the best of me. I’ve known my wife for a little over five years, but that was relatively new in my life that I didn’t have for the majority of my life. That’s kind of a new bucket. Then I also have my family that I’m very close to, my brothers are my best friends in the world. I have my parents. I try to make sure I spend time with them and talk to them regularly. I have my grandparents. There’s a family bucket. There’s also friends that I try to maintain relationships with. I also work out and try to stay healthy and try to take care of myself. Then, of course, I have responsibilities around this house. I cook dinner most nights. I do the grocery shopping. I do things around here.

Those, and then my career and advancing something, this podcast is one of the things that I’ve made time for as a commitment in these buckets, those things are what comprise Patrick. I work to make sure all of those things are getting just the best that they can for me. If any of those suffer, especially the ones I mentioned first; wife, family, friends, then I’m going to take from the others to compensate. I try to avoid that as much as I can.

This is a very long-winded way of saying once upon a time, I had fewer of those things, and I ran my own business. When you run your own business, you work at all times. I am by nature a grinder. If I have a problem, I tend to believe if we are not sick, if we don’t have a disease or we’re physically hurt, we can fix any problem as long as we’re here to deal with it. I will grind through it and find a way to get there, but being a workaholic, I think sometimes you have to step back and model good behavior or think about how that might impact your team, especially as the boss or as the person they report to, seeing you on at this hour or doing these things or whatever it may be.

Just kicking off that conversation from that long-winded introduction, but being a workaholic, being someone who loves to work and maybe that gets out of hand sometimes and you work too much and you wish, “I should’ve stopped. I should get stopped at that point,” there’s nothing that’s going to happen- 30 years from now, we’re going to look back and say, “Boy, I wish Allison had sent that one email back in ’72.” No one will say that, but do you find yourself adjusting some of your behavior to set the right expectations as you grow this team?

[00:23:45] Allison Able: Yes and that’s actually something I did very intentionally with this new job too. When I took on my position at Sisense, knowing that I was going to be growing a team, maybe it’s just me getting older, I’ve tried to take time for mindfulness and really sit down and write down what do I want out of life and how do I envision my life and how do I envision that running even day-to-day? I know that sounds a little crazy-

[00:24:10] Patrick O’Keefe: No, it doesn’t.

[00:24:10] Allison Able: -and it’s been very helpful for me because that really set the stage when I walked in the door for me to structure my calendar, my meetings, my interactions with my coworkers, when I’m working, when I’m not working. That sometimes gets difficult in a global environment but I’ve made sure to be very intentional in my give and take in that too.

I have an early morning meeting. I need to shut the computer early afternoon. That was a key, helpful thing that I did walking into this new position and preparing for this higher-level manager role. Another thing which I want to add, which you sparked for me, that really changed my outlook too, is I’m one of those people that adopted a dog in COVID, and having a pup who I love and adore-

[00:24:52] Patrick O’Keefe: A living thing that needs you to live, who needs you for sustenance.

[00:24:55] Allison Able: Well, it doesn’t go according to your schedule, it has been a great learning experience as well for me to really shut that computer or walk away, spend time with that dog. He has to walk, he has to eat. He has to do all of these things. That’s also been, I think, helpful as well as this job transition that I’ve taken and really being intentional about the boundaries that I set for myself too, and sticking to them. I can be notorious sometimes to make excuses and stay a little extra late. Sometimes you do, but not every night. Making sure to be like, “Oh, Allison, you’re making an excuse. Time to go to the gym. Allison, you’re making an excuse. Time to go walk the dog, just walk away.” When I do have that employee, they can see that it’s okay to take that time and have a healthy balance.

[00:25:40] Patrick O’Keefe: That’s great. I think having reported into a variety of different folks over the years, as I know you have, you see good things, you see bad things, and you take away from those experiences that you will want to pass on when you run your own team, like I’ve reported into people who– They had a little bit of community experience. Sure, but they didn’t want to do that work. That’s why they hired me.

Yes, not only were they not as good as it is me. No offense. Sometimes you just got to talk that talk, but they would butt in and get in the way. Do you want to do this job? Because you told me you didn’t. That’s why you hired me. You need to graduate as a person and grow up a little bit at each stage, step you take. I feel like this is really one of those types of moments where you’re like, “I’m figuring out these things,” because again, I think having a boss or someone you report to that models that, speaking from a personal experience, and you brought this experience too, is so powerful and freeing.

When you have a boss who’s like, “Oh, I was at the doctor, I need to go to the doctor. Don’t worry about it. Put it in this channel if you want it. If you’re going to be gone for an hour going to the doctor, that’s fine.” Just having things like that where not everything is so rigid, and you need to stress over things that make you a better person because the reality is that if you don’t take the time to do those things, you can’t be the best person for the community.

If you can’t be the best person for the community, then your results suffer. There’s just a limit to what we can do productively. The stuff that needs to get done. Beyond that again, I hate to draw that example, but I’ve said this to my own teams in the past when they’re stressing over something, I said, “You know what? 10 years from now, 20 years from now, no one’s going to care. We’re not curing cancer here.”

Communities are amazing things. Community has given me so much. It’s given me my career, half of my closest friends. It’s the reason I know my wife. Communities have changed the arc of my life. Yet, on an individual, one-moment letter, one email, one post, I’m not going to be in my deathbed being like, “I wish I had been in the forum for another hour.” I’m going to be like, “I wish I could see my dad one more time,” or, “I wish I could have another hour with Kara,” or whatever it is. That sounds morbid, but if you put yourself in that place, you will be guided differently, right?

[00:27:45] Allison Able: You realize when you set those boundaries– It will drive me crazy sometimes to know there’s an email in my inbox I could probably respond to, but then the next day happens, and did the world end? No, and the community’s still going and thriving.

[00:27:58] Patrick O’Keefe: Exactly.

[00:27:58] Allison Able: That’s something that I’ve found comfort in.

[00:28:00] Patrick O’Keefe: There’s great power in that too, of being able to step away and have things go okay. I think that speaks well for you if that’s the community you build, that it doesn’t need you to exist.

[00:28:12] Allison Able: That’s something I think I’ve placed such an emphasis recently in my career, community management journey on operations and building good sustaining systems within your community, that can be partially automated to take some of the load off. Also, I hate to use the word scale, but can scale-

[00:28:31] Patrick O’Keefe: That’s fine.

[00:28:31] Allison Able: -as well. [chuckles]

[00:28:33] Patrick O’Keefe: It’s not a bad word. It’s just used badly sometimes.

[00:28:36] Allison Able: I’m probably one of those people that uses that. It’s one of my favorite words because I do think it’s really important to keep in mind. Like you mentioned, you can’t do everything all the time. I think being an experienced community manager of one has really helped me understand that too. Building those systems and processes is worth your time and your effort and does have a massive payoff over time, especially as you’re able to iterate and grow from there too. You don’t have to do it all at once. That’s one reason why the Sisense community is in beta right now. We are being very intentional with the fact that this is MVP. This is our first launch. It is our first introduction, and we are going to be growing rapidly from there and in large ways over time when we’re ready.

[00:29:25] Patrick O’Keefe: That’s good advice. Let’s talk about community programs. One of your current areas of focus is launching community programs specifically. You were asking yourself, “What is the right order of community programs to maximize community growth, but also optimize community support and management given current and future resources?” What could the right order look like?

[00:29:46] Allison Able: The approach that I’m taking right now, and again this could change, especially as you start to dive into the mechanics of how all of these things work, how I’ve decided we are going to grow as a community at this point on the programmatic side, and you can argue with me if this is a program or not, I believe it is, is the product feedback. That is one of the top things that our customers have stated that they really want to be able to give and be involved in the product development process.

We’ve prioritized that as a program that we want to institute within the community. As you probably know, it’s a very complex thing to tackle to make sure that it is an actual thriving space that users feel heard and aligns with our product processes. That’s going to be one of the first things that we really look at. I chose that partially because of the need that’s been expressed both internally and externally. My background fits with some of the experience that I’ve had.

From there, we want to also start to launch some dedicated groups. We have a really active partner network, which is really exciting for me because partners can be such an asset in the community. They’re very excited to share their expertise and get involved in the conversation, which excites me. We also want to create a space for them where they feel like they can have a connection to the organization and the space to collaborate with each other too. We’re going to be creating a partner space and some other groups as well.

Developers is another one that we’ll be tackling soon, which is, again, another complex program to dive into. From there, another one that we’re looking at probably towards mid-year next year is user groups and how we might be able to launch some user groups as well. We’ve had some expressed interest both on the partner and customer side, which excites me again because there is interest in there could be a great marriage there, but that in my opinion, oftentimes requires a dedicated resource to really be able to properly nurture it. That’s something that is in the back of my head, as I continue to build out my team too, and what that looks like.

[00:31:50] Patrick O’Keefe: What’s one program you looked at and decided, “This is not anywhere near where we’re at right now, not now, maybe later”?

[00:31:57] Allison Able: I will say it’s probably going to be that user group piece for us right now. This might be controversial too for other community managers, but I weighted against the champion/super user concept almost. I’d rather focus more on the champion/super user concept and what we can build around that and then potentially leverage some of those individuals to get us started in the user group piece. It’s not that I’m not thinking about user groups, I’m just trying to put it in the right order, so it can all work together to lead towards success too.

[00:32:28] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. I think given where you’re at, I feel like the thing I always worry about with user groups is segmenting off people before there’s like a well-tended garden. We don’t even know we’re growing yet here. [chuckles] Are the tomatoes are going to take this season? Or is it going to be flowers here? If we really go deep on tomatoes and we get like 10 varieties, yes, we can go to the tomato user group over here, let them do their thing. We really don’t know. We’re still building out this beta experience. Forcing people to segment– I don’t know, from your perspective. This is obviously– Mileage may vary, lots of different approaches, million ways to do the same thing, nothing wrong, but breaking people off before there’s a really firm community sense just yet.

[00:33:10] Allison Able: Yes. Again, I’ll circle back to my beta comment. I again was very intentional with the beta launch because again, one of the big things for me is that we are operationally efficient in the way that we manage the community. A huge piece of that is making sure that we have internal alignment and resource allocation to be successful as a community. Our focus right now, as you mentioned, there are kind of on those community basics. We want to observe, see what’s working, what’s not working, pivot, iterate, and then we can expand from there too. Then we’ll have a really good, healthy insight into the decisions we need to make too. At least in my experience, that’s been the case.

[00:33:49] Patrick O’Keefe: Well, Allison, I look forward to following up in the future with you about those decisions and how they worked out. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. It’s been great.

[00:33:57] Allison Able: Yes, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for offering me the opportunity to chat. Always really enjoy these conversations, so thank you.

[00:34:06] Patrick O’Keefe: We’ve been talking with Allison Able, senior manager, community at Sisense. Visit the Sisense Community Beta at community.sisense.com. That’s S-I-S-E-N-S-E.com. You can follow Allison on Twitter @_AAble_.

For the transcript from this episode, plus highlights and links that we mentioned, please visit communitysignal.com. Community Signal is produced by Karn Broad and Carol Benovic-Bradley is our editorial lead. Happy holidays.

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